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Saturday, September 27, 2003 ( 9/27/2003 09:58:00 AM ) Bill S. MUST WORSHIP TEEVEE? – Caught the debut of this season's new religio-drama CBS' Joan of Arcadia last night. Not as squishy as Touched by Angel, the series benefits from some nice snappish work by lead Amber Tamblyn and the able support of Joseph Mantegna and Mary Steenburgen as the parents of our modern Joan of Arc. Hope these two watchable pros don't get shunted too much to the sidelines. But what grabbed this ex-English major's fancy was scripter Barbara Hall's quick reference to Lawrence Durrell's marvelous Alexandria Quartet in a scene where our heroine attempts to apply for a job in a bookstore. Not only does Durrell's work fit into the Egyptian motif that we see in the shop, but it also reminded me that the man did a translation of Pope Joan. I'm a sucker for a good literary joke. Turned over to Boston Public after Arcadia and saw that one of that show's plotlines also wrestled with questions of divinity. In it, an AV geek starts thinking that he's Jesus Christ after he's been electro-shocked by a malfunctioning slide projector. The rest of the school starts reacting to this delusion in predictable ways: the blond & burly jock gets upset over this "blasphemous" persona; other students look to him like he might be the real thing; atheist teacher Danny Hanson (Michael Rapaport) is most profoundly disturbed by it. Soon as the young boy started taking on the trappings of deity, I started wondering whether Kelley and company knew their Fox show was gonna be following Joan of Arcadia – and wrote this storyline as a way of both tweaking and putting a more "realistic" spin on Hall's teen-talkin'-to-God fantasy. Wouldn't put it past 'em. # | ( 9/27/2003 06:59:00 AM ) Bill S. THEN YOU SHALL CALL ME MASTER – Congrats go out to David Fiore for receiving his Master's in English. Did that myself once in the Antediluvian Age, and there are days when I still miss it. What's not to like about a time in your life where your primary job is to read and think about reading? David, in talking comics and writer/artist Frank Miller, notes that his favorite Miller work was his later run on Daredevil that comprised the "Born Again" storyline. I reread that story around the time of the Daredevil movie and found myself thrown by the way it veers into crackbrained political satire in the final quarter, undercutting the emotional impact of its core story. Elektra: Assassin, which charges full-speed into political hallucination, is much more successful, I think. I enjoy Frank Miller (have been recently working my way through TCJ Library's coffee table interview book - much recommended for Miller fans), but often find his predilection for the pulp visceral to be at odds with his attempts at rethinking mainstream superhero characters. Dark Knight 2 shows what can happen when this boyish impulse goes unchecked: lots of impressive energy, but too often the story descends into an undisciplined muddle. Favorite Frank Miller work? I don't have one, though there are individual issues of Daredevil that are really quite fine. . . # | Friday, September 26, 2003 ( 9/26/2003 01:00:00 PM ) Bill S. ANOTHER USE FOR DUCT TAPE – This week's teevee question: where would you rather live – Stuckeyville, Ohio, or Poland, New Hampshire? The Brotherhood of Poland, New Hampsire is David E. Kelley's return to the provincial dramedy of his feature film Mystery, Alaska. Set around a trio of portly middle-aged brothers played by Randy Quaid, Chris Penn and John Carroll Lynch, the show provides a middling blend of quirky character comedy and sub-Winesburg, Ohio angst. You know you're in Kelley Kountry when a New England wife-and-mother threatens to withhold fellatio from her hubby if he persists with a cracked scheme to use duct tape to tighten his ass(!) for a job interview. Or when a smart-allecky daughter breaks up a bickering family dinner by loudly announcing, "I lost my virginity!" This here's a Teevee Town, alright – too bad it's not a more interesting one. Each Shaw Bro gets his very own plotline in the opener: town mayor Garrett (Lynch) is being blackmailed by a plus-sized former mistress and politically distressed by the recurrence of deer in the neighborhood; sheriff Hank (Quaid) is undergoing marital therapy, in part, because he's been surreptitiously TIVOing Katie Couric ("You covet her!" his wife accusingly charges – and we're meant to chortle at the oh-so-not-21st-century word); while youngest Shaw Waylon (Penn) is a chronically unemployed doof (yeah, he's the one with the duct tape). Of the Shaw spouses, the only one to rate her own full storyline is Hank's wife Dottie (Mare Winningham), who has dreams of renovating the town's trashed-out movie house after apparently watching a cable broadcast of The Majestic. She enlists the aid of the town's moneyman, Scott Haggis (Larry Miller), who agrees to front the money on condition that the theatre double one day as a temple. When Hank hears of this proviso, he's convince it's because Haggis wants to turn the whole town Jewish. Yo ho ho, small-town anti-Semitism! Also providing weak chuckles: the son and daughter of mayor Garrett, who is flummoxed when he discovers that son Malcolm has pierced an eyebrow. ("Wait until he discovers where you're pierced," Malcolm says to his sis when she ribs him for getting in trouble.) Daughter Monica discovers Garrett's unfaithful past by tricking the truth out of her Uncle Hank with a strategy so obvious Homer Simpson wouldn't fall for it. Then she has the nerve to get upset by what she uncovers. Hey girly, you're gonna go messing into middle-aged secrets, you'd better expect to find something sordid. At his best, David E. Kelley can craft some decent dramatic television (e.g., The Practice when it was cookin'); at his worst, Kelley is excruciatingly arch (think of poor vice-principal Scott Guber on Boston Public). From its very set-up, Brotherhood seems designed to key into the ultra-prolific Kelley's worst dramatic instincts. And on the basis of its premiere, I'd say the show has fulfilled its lack-of-promise. Despite a talented cast (most appealing: Penn's overly chatty Waylon), I came away from the show not really caring if I ever returned to Poland, NH again. Where would I rather live? The town with a really cool retro-styled bowling alley. . . NOTE: I accidentally flipped two actors' name when I originally posted this piece, but it's since been corrected. # | ( 9/26/2003 10:15:00 AM ) Bill S. THIS IS YOUR BRAIN ON BAD TELEVISION . . . – I have an acquaintance, an old school leftist who once taught college English, who used to wax wroth about the old Mission: Impossible series. He'd wonder out loud – on more than one occasion – whether the show wasn't part of some complicit agreement between the U.S. Govt. and Big Media to persuade the country that Dirty Tricks covert ops were noble and necessary because their targets were All Bad. "Mission: Impossible led to Watergate," he'd assert unequivocally. All I could offer in response was I was too busy watching Barbara Bain to notice. I wonder what Bob would make of Threat Matrix. Centered on a Homeland Security force, with combined experts from the FBI, CIA and NSA, the ABC series is a deadly serious terrorist chase. Each week our steadfast and indiscernible hero(in)es (so faceless I don't even feel the urge to visit the show's website and learn their names) go after a new cell of baddies, while their balding chief delivers pronouncements at wrap-up press conferences that sound like they could've written by Tom Ridge's speechwriters. Two weeks into the series, and we've seen our gang eliminate a suicide bomber sleeper agent by grabbing and locking him in what looks like a reinforced port-a-potty just as he's about to blow (wouldn't you hate to be clean-up guy on that one?) and watched a drug dealer blow himself up after he realizes his meth lab deals have been funding another cell of would-be bombers. If I was still in fifth grade, I bet I'd love this show because they sure know how to Blow Things Up Real Good. Our Homeland Team is gifted with the kind of Clancy Lite satellite spy equipment so sharp it can count the blackheads on a terrorist's nose, so naturally they're able to catch the bad guys with all due speed. Me, I vacillate between thinking this approach feeds into the audience's sense of overwrought paranoia or ultimately denudes our 21st century sense of menace. (How dangerous can these guys be, after all, if they can be thwarted weekly?) True, the security mavens on Fox's 24 managed to defeat a terrorist menace within a day, but since that process was spread over a full season, it successfully communicated how intensive and grueling the job can be. But for those who've bemoaned the continued existence of so-called liberal entertainments like The West Wing, this show should offer much relief. At the end of the drug dealer episode, our balding chief (boy, do I miss Edward Platt!) delivers a diatribe on how Drugs=Terrorism with such ham-fisted seriousness that I half expected him to smash an egg on the podium. "We're fighting a war of dependence," he states, "which unfortunately makes victims of us all." After watching this rote attempt to cash in on the Terror War, I felt victimized, alright, but not by drugs. . . # | Thursday, September 25, 2003 ( 9/25/2003 03:28:00 PM ) Bill S. RUBBER PIRATES – Okay, we should make allowances for Dirk Deppey because he's been steadfastly blogging while ill. (Get better soon, Dirk!) But contrary to his round-up posting today, John Jakala’s review of Shonen Jump is not about the current issue, but its third. The manga anthology's current ish is either #9 or 10, depending on how up-to-date your local supermart is, and the only reason I mention this is because some of the series that Jakala covers in his review have since graduated into pb-sized collections. (Recommended starting point: the pirate comic One Piece.) SJump seems to be holding at about 330 pages these days, but at $4.95, it’s still a bargain. # | ( 9/25/2003 09:50:00 AM ) Bill S. GALAXY ADIEU – Alan David Doane, overseer of the Comic Book Galaxy, has announced on his web log that his site will soon cease to be. When I first started this blog, one of the first comics-themed sites that I rolled to was ADD's. I first came across his writing on The Comics Journal's message boards and was impressed by his capacity for appreciating both mainstream genre work and the most individualistic art comics (that openness to comic art of all stripes is rarer among comics reviewers than you’d first think). At times Alan's passion may appear to get the best of him – his impatience with those unable to appreciate James Kochalka's Sketchbook Diaries, for instance, once led to him half-jokingly "banning" the philistines from his site – but that zeal has also fed an impressive body of review work. I've made Comic Book Galaxy a regular daily stop over the last year, so I hope that wherever Alan lands, he's still able to keep the writing comin'. # | ( 9/25/2003 09:47:00 AM ) Bill S. DOG HAIRS ON THE COUCH – Caught the Sorkin-free premiere of The West Wing last night: scripter John (E.R.) Wells clearly had his hands full trying to corral this baby. All attempts at replicating Aaron Sorkin's His Gal Friday-style quippery were abandoned in favor of showing us how serious things had gotten: all things considered, that makes sense, but I'm not sure I could take a full season of these bright characters moping around. Until this ep, I wouldn't have said it was possible, but somehow they managed to leach every ounce of charm out of actor John Goodman. . . # | Wednesday, September 24, 2003 ( 9/24/2003 05:22:00 AM ) Bill S. I'M A-RAMBLIN' – On the road to Moline, IL., this a.m, and I won't likely return until Thursday p.m. So if you don't already, why not check out all the fine reading that's just a click away on my blogroll? And, while you're at it, why not hector Jay Zilber into posting something new? # | ( 9/24/2003 04:05:00 AM ) Bill S. SIXTY MINUTE MANGA – (Episode Three: choppin' brocolli.) I first learned of Iron Wok Jan! (ComicsOne) from a Shawn Fumo comment discussing manga diversity. A comic series devoted to culinary competition: if there's any topic removed from the themes and concerns of mainstream American comics, it's the simple act of eating (unless you're talking about a world-spanning entity, capable of devouring whole planets – or a cartoony glutton like Little Lotta or Jughead). In mainstream comic terms, the act of food preparation is even more mundane. Though cooking has appeared as a subject in magical realist fiction (Like Water for Chocolate) and in character-driven movies like Big Night, you've got to wonder how anyone could make it exciting in manga format. Oh, look, he's cutting up more vegetables! I'm not a die-hard foodee: only show on The Food Network I've viewed more than once is Unwrapped, a series that's primarily devoted to candy and junk food. I've never made it all the way through a half hour of Iron Chef. But Shinji Saljyo's Iron Wok Jan! ("Supervisor: Keiko Oyama," the cover also tells me, which I assume means that either Oyama edits the series or is a smiling figurehead like Stan Lee) delights me and in ways I wouldn't have expected when I first heard of this series. Jan! is set at the Gobancha Restaurant in Ginza, which we're told is the foremost Chinese restaurant in Tokyo. Into this bastion of top-flight cookery comes Jan Akiyama, a "very skilled yet arrogant chef" who's been drilled in the art of Chinese cooking by his harsh taskmaster grandfather. Announcing that he's the "one and only king of Chinese cooking," Jan instantly alienates the rest of the kitchen staff, including buxom trainee Kiriko, niece to the restaurant's head chef and a talented cook on her own. Cooking, Jan asserts, is all about competition, but Kiriko (who has a pretty healthy ego of her own, we soon learn) begs to differ. No, she asserts, it's about heart. A real Men Are from Mars, Women Venus conflict. At one point, the two trade so many one word barbs that you just know romance is inevitable. Much of the first volume is devoted to episodes where Jan and Kiriko demonstrate their expertise. Each display of skill is treated like a showdown (you feel like whistling a Ennio Morricone theme every time one of the cooks gets challenged), with much aggressive posturing and braggadocio. ("I'll make you realize that cooking is about heart and not competition," Kiriko proclaims at one point, looking as if she'd like to cram that lesson down Jan's throat, while Jan is shown tauntingly laughing at his cooking inferiors.) But the best of them are also cooking puzzles: how, for instance, can Jan cook an odorless stir-fry dish using pork liver, "the smelliest internal organ"? In a way, the chapters of Iron Wok Jan! are structured like an old Silver Age superhero comic: we have a problem and our cooking hero solves it, then explains how s/he solved it to the other chefs and the reader. (Only thing that differentiates it from a Mort Weisinger-edited tale is the absence of a panel showing the lead winking at the reader.) In two chapters, for instance, both Jan and Kiriko are separately challenged by a mercenary food critic to serve him something he will not be able to identify. They both succeed, though Kiriko does so in a way designed to preserve the old fraud's dignity, while Jan naturally rubs his nose in it, making an enemy of the critic in the process. Because the boy and girl leads are sixteen when the story opens (as is a third character, Okonogi, an inept trainee who mainly serves to ask, "What's goin' on?" for the reader), we know that both still need to grow to become true chefs. As a complete series, Iron Wok Jan! spans some twenty-seven volumes, so clearly this isn't something that’s gonna happen overnight. Midway into the first volume, we learn part of Jan’s history: that his training as a cook was accompanied with much not-so-grandfatherly abuse, that the dying man's sent Jan to the restaurant as "an assassin to destroy" Kiriko's grandfather, the owner of Gobancha and himself a master of Chinese cooking. In addition to the two young cooks, then, the series also contrasts two different mentoring styles. In the last chapter of volume one, Mutsuju Gobancha comes down to the kitchen to demonstrate teaching by example. The older, harsher ways of teaching are no good, he says, since they only serve to drive students away from cooking. In addition to the conflict between elder teachers, Iron Wok Jan! can also be viewed as a battle between two types of creators: the amateur (one who does something first for the love of it) and the pro (one who does it because it's what they've been trained to do). We don't see Jan sit back and eat any of his creations, but maybe that's not expected in this culinary community. What really matters is the approbation of those you serve. Saijyo's art in the first volume is devoted to plenty of panels of characters facing each other down, zestfully tossing food around and talking with their mouths full. We get many loving graphics of unprepared, then finished food, sometimes with text explaining cooking techniques or recipes alongside. (I have no idea how true to Chinese cooking these are, but for the story, I'm willing to believe they'll work.) Occasionally, the artist seems to fall back on the same character poses – barely a page featuring her goes by without Kiriko crossing her arms under her breasts, for instance – but at least the sweaty foreheads make sense. We're in a kitchen, damn it, so of course it's hot. Iron Wok Jan! is packaged as a teen-focused series with a suggested of age 13 and up, which seems apt. Can't quite picture the profile of the average American reader for this series (aside from me, of course), but whoever they are, I suspect they need an active sense of whimsy. That or a burning desire to look at black-and-white renderings of veal intestines. # | Tuesday, September 23, 2003 ( 9/23/2003 12:56:00 PM ) Bill S. ANDY STURMER WATCH – A couple weeks ago, yours truly and Johnny B. were discussing power poppers Jellyfish and the band's lead singer/songwriter Andy Sturmer. Johnny wondered if Sturmer was somehow responsible for the theme to The Cartoon Net’s new Teen Titans cartoon. By chance I found the answer to that question today. Visiting my local CD shoppe, I happened to hear a strongly appealing track on the store stereo: sounded kind of like Apples In Stereo being sung by Shonen Knife. The song was "Your Love Is A Drug," and it was being sung by a duo of Japanese women known as Puffy Amiyumi. Their most recent album, Nice (Bar/None Records), which includes "Teen Titans Theme," has Sturmer's hands all over it. He composed the music (with an ear tilted toward surf and garage sounds), wrote some of the lyrics (including the rah-rah words to the "Titans Theme"), plus played a score of instruments. The disc is packed with glisteny power-pop that generally avoids veering into kandy kitsch (unlike Shonen Knife at their most excessive, for instance). Biggest exception: the cartoon theme song, which recalls the camp silly tone established by Bis' Powerpuff Girls end theme. Also unlike Shonen Knife, almost half the songs are in untranslated Japanese. A fun set, then, for those attracted to pop-rock at its most willfully frivolous. Bet Johnny B.'d dig it. I know I do. . . # | Monday, September 22, 2003 ( 9/22/2003 02:45:00 PM ) Bill S. SAWDUST, TINSEL & JES' PLAIN DUST – If you learn anything about life in Depression Era America from watching HBO's new dark fantasy series Carnivale, it's this: it sure was dusty back then. "I'm damn tired of wakin' up with grit in my teeth," one of the sluttish hoochie koochie gals who bump-&-grind for Burnett Bros. Fair observes in the second episode, and from what we've seen so far, we get where she's coming from. Created by Dan Knauf, Carnivale follows the travails of a struggling circus as it drives through Grapes of Wrathland by way of Twin Peaks. First time we see the traveling circus, it's outside the Dust Bowl farm of Ben Hawkins (Nick "Terminator 3" Stahl) and his recently deceased mother. Ben is struggling to hold off a bulldozer that's about to demolish the foreclosed farm and bury his ma in the fallow ground, when the carnie folk show up to provide some moral support – and not incidentally offer him a job as a roustabout once the burying's done. Ben's been "expected" by the show's Management, and before the first episode ends, we have an inkling why. The young farm kid with the chain gang scars on his ankles has healing power in his hands. He cures a small girl stricken with polio at the end of the opening episode, laying waste to the crops all around him as he does. Ben's also troubled by a series of portentous nightmares that he shares with Brother Justin Crowe (Clancy Brown), an evangelist with the ability to impose visions on those he touches. When he catches a destitute Okie woman trying to steal from the collection basket, a shower of coins seemingly starts spurting from her mouth like cherries from an Eastwicke-ian. Brother Justin claims to be doing God’s work, but the way we see him spying on his bathing sister Iris (Amy Madigan) tells a different story. Ben and Justin aren't the only ones seeing omens. Two of the carnies, a blind mentallist named Lodz (Patrick Bachau) and a catatonic fortuneteller known as Apollonia (Diane Sallinger), are tracking the young roustabout with interest – Lodz after he unwisely touches the sleeping newcomer and becomes privy to his nightmares. To the rest of the circus folk, Ben may be a rube – in the opening ep he's taunted by a group of sideshow freaks that includes a lizard man and a pair of singing Siamese Twins – but that's a judgment we know won't last many episodes. The unseen Management, speaking through chatty dwarf manager Samson (David Lynch regular Michael J. Anderson, who must be pleased as punch to not have his words coming out backwards), knows Ben is important in some as yet-undefined Staving-off-Apocalypse kinda way. And Apollonia, speaking telepathically to her Tarot-wielding daughter Sofie (Clea Duvall), doesn't want Ben to get away either. In the midst of all the dark visions (a trailer that appears and disappears, a "pickled punk" that opens its eyes and follows Ben as he dashes out of the trailer, snow that turns into blood on Brother Justin's face, and so on), there's also a mystery surrounding Ben's dead mother and a former Carnivale performer named Hank Scudder, the Gentleman Geek. Could this mystery be related to Ben's dreams? Of course it is, but exactly how is still unclear. We're in, Samson intones in the premiere's opening, a time of Light and Darkness. But all that Great Clash 'tween Good & Evil stuff is still just secondary to the ewww-enducing sight of lizard man Gecko shedding his skin. Carnivale does a slick job evoking the look and feel of its period – and it's filled with lingo and behind-the-tent details Ten-in-One buffs will love. The supporting cast is plentiful if initially a bit confusing: from a still-potent Adrienne Barbeau as the mother of a dim circus strongman to Debra Christofferson's sensuous bearded lady to Ralph Waite (what's a Great Depression fable without Ralph Waite?) as Brother Justin's preachifyin' mentor. On the basis of two slow-building episodes, it's obvious the show's leading toward a showdown between Justin and Ben (one a deliverer of false images, the other a for-real healer), but it's also apparent that there's more to the Carnivale than we've yet been allowed to see. Pretty gothic for HBO, which, after all, has built its teevee drama rep on more moderne angst-filled fare like The Sopranos, The Wire and Six Feet Under (though both this last and Carnivale share a similar love for the macabre). Twin Peaks, perhaps its closest forbearer, still kept its action in the here-and-now, not a year where "The Shadow" still reigned on radio. Will Carnivale build the same level of buzz HBO's Emmy nomination hogs have garnered? Doubtful, but who cares? On the basis of its first two episodes, I'm ready to surrender to the show's first season. Dust and all, Carnivale is the most promising fantasy television debuting this fall. # | Sunday, September 21, 2003 ( 9/21/2003 03:23:00 PM ) Bill S. DEATH AND MORE DEATH IN OLDE EUROPE – Caught Ripley's Game on IFC last night. A later entry in the series of Patricia Highsmith tales that earlier includes The Talented Mr. Ripley, this film features John Malkovich in the title role. To my eye, Malkovich contains the right blend of sinuous charm and menace to portray Tom Ripley - when he confesses to patsy Jonathan Trevanney (Dougray Scott) that he has no conscience, you believe him - though I found Matt Damon equally convincing in portraying a boyish version of this chameleonic sociopath. As a story, Game doesn't have the same forward thrust as Talented Mr. Ripley. Much of the plot's focus is on Ripley's bringing Trevanney into his world of criminality: in a way it's like a darker version of Strangers on A Train (Highsmith's first novel), only in this case the "innocent" gives into the seductiveness of murder and is ultimately destroyed for it. Trevanney, a frame-maker who is dying of leukemia, takes on a hit to build a nest egg for his family. He has no way of knowing that Ripley was behind his initial recruitment or that Tom will intervene once the killings start escalating. There's a darkly comic scene on a train involving a series of assassinations and a railcar loo that's like a twisted version of the stateroom scene in A Night at The Opera. All in all, an enjoyably grim film: director Liliana Cavani may not be as lush-minded as Anthony Minghella, who gave his Highsmith film the look of To Catch A Thief Hitchcock, but that's not what this film's about. The earlier Ripley tale concerns itself with deception in the pursuit of glamorous life; the later Game is about scraping by to survive. Trevanney may be an old world snob (a fact that's established early when he sneers at Ripley's taste at a party), but he's also struggling to make ends meet. It's just his misfortune that one person with a way out of his financial woes turns out to be Ripley. . . # | |
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